Esperanza had bigger wheels than I, a whole bigger bike, actually. Mine was made for kids or grown-ass men who thought they were kids and liked to fling themselves upside down just to feel something. The bigger wheels made her faster, so it was strange to be in the lead for once as we rode.
That day Noemi had jammed her finger on something unrelated to BJJ at all and couldn’t participate. She just coached me and Esperanza on how to escape from front-facing chokes. I had to practice grabbing Esperanza by the throat over and over. Esperanza kept telling me to make it tighter, tighter, tighter. When I thought it was way too much and was about to let go she said okay, good. It wasn’t cold yet. October was like that. The trees were giving up their color, but it wasn’t like TV with the piles of leaves that dogs jumped in and the cut of an icy breeze. The air here could get humid and balmy even if the stores wanted to sell us pumpkin-colored sweaters and brown leather boots. We rode home in our T-shirts, the short sleeves rolled up under our pits.
To this day I feel like perverts drive Hondas. The little girl had been out of sight for too long, and the car too. I wasn’t afraid like Esperanza yet; it didn’t occur to me that I should’ve been until I saw her lean forward on her bike and begin to pedal past me. Sometimes it’s the witnessing of a horror story that makes us forget we’re in one. She pedaled for the life of the little girl and our own. I pedaled just to keep up. Back then I had no imagination for the worst of us, those who take and take and stretch the tender parts of life to the point of breaking.
I saw a play once as a kid about a detective bear that solved mysteries. I used to think about crime that way for a long time, like a child in a theater safely surrounded by adults who keep the danger far away on a stage. Criminals weren’t actual people anymore; they were impostors playing a part, monsters inside of a human husk to hide their true selves, their buckled skin, hot dumpster breath, stained cotton balls for eyes, and vinegar sweat. It doesn’t take long to realize that it isn’t like that at all.
We pedaled and pedaled for only seconds before we stopped. We stopped because the little girl was running toward us now. She’d come back from around the corner to the silent main street, where there was nothing but our heartbeats and the complaints of birds in the air. I was ready to die, not for the little girl but for Esperanza, because Esperanza chewed her dangerous candy, walked into bruises day after day, and demanded that I try to squeeze the life from her just to test her worth. I knew as strong as we were, as fast as we were, we were still very young and in relation to whoever was in that Honda probably very small and not at all like Noemi, made hard as a needle by the world. So I readied myself for death.
We stopped and held our ground while the girl made it to us and paused in between our bikes, looking over her shoulder as the car slowly approached. I wanted the car to careen into the curb and then a corpse stumble out of the passenger side and a greasy alien with a mouth like a lamprey eel and arms long as my whole body to burst from the windshield. But villains never look the way they should. Threats are often surprising and unannounced, so it takes a lot of people to protect one another, especially little girls. The car sped off and even though all of our eyes watched it go, we never saw the driver. Just like that we were alone, the three of us. The day faded fast right before the gold streetlights lit up the sidewalk. We had the dusk to ourselves and moved exhausted again through time as if the shapes of the night could be anything we wanted.
Quiz
Match the teacher to the description, direct quote, and unsaid thing.
1. Dr. Bontemps (U.S. Government)
________
A. Distributes a basket of bananas and condoms once a semester with full-color photos of STIs in bloom: our total comprehensive sex education.
2. Coach Watson (PE/Softball Instructor)
________
B. Selective in his predatory obsession with certain girl athletes; can do thirty pull-ups in a row and insists on demonstrating weekly.
3. Ms. Harris (French/Spanish)
________
C. Chews and pops bubble gum all period, the mass explodes over her matte-purple lipstick like a bladder full of air over and over.
4. Mrs. Washington (Health and Wellness)
________
D. A true hotep motherfucker, always eating organic raw almonds and cranking his lips down at one thing or another from the girls’ hairstyles to our cheese and crackers.
5. Mr. Strauss (Spanish)
________
E. White South African, bald, pale like a peanut salesman in a black-and-white movie.
6. Coach Hales (PE/ Wrestling)
________
F. One of few lingering members of a previous generation of white faculty who now find themselves in a Black and brown institution—super old, with the rounded spine of an armadillo.
7. Ms. Williams (AP English)
________
G. Arms and head like a Tyrannosaurus rex with perpetually droopy eyes like she will burst into apology for something but never does.
1. Dr. Bontemps
________
A. “Your accent marks are backwards. Wait, they’re fine. Just ask me where the damn bathroom is!”
2. Coach Watson
________
B. “Don’t eat your own dicks, people!”
3. Ms. Harris
________
C. “I am an African American too.”
4. Mrs. Washington
________
D. “Slavery on paper ended in 1864, but slavery of the Black mind is big business today!”
5. Mr. Strauss
________
E. “James Baldwin said…”
6. Coach Hales
________
F. “Stop dragging your asses. Knees up!”
7. Ms. Williams
________
G. “It’s not football!”
1. Dr. Bontemps
________
A. “The Black woman is a queen, but they insist on putting the artificial scraps of white and Asian capitalism on their crowns.”
2. Coach Watson
________
B. “The girl is going to be fat. Most of them, probably. They’ll all look like hell in ten years, tops. Lazy. Won’t get anything done without being told.”
3. Ms. Harris
________
C. “Cal State Dominguez Hills is hiring adjuncts for the fall.”
4. Mrs. Washington
________
D. “The whole goddamn world thinks the only sports that matter have a fucking ball.”
5. Mr. Strauss
________
E. “I’m not even supposed to teach Spanish.”
6. Coach Hales
________
F. “Every year the brains get smaller, the legs longer, and the tits bigger. There has to be some kind of conspiracy. Something is in the milk.”
7. Ms. Williams
________
G. “I offer kinship though we are not the same, not today or tomorrow. I know more of the world than you, how much cruelty awaits no matter what we say or do.”
Menstruation
When me, T, and Mama are all on our periods, things get volatile. Women menstruating at the same time is a myth except when it’s not. Sudden irrational displays of emotion during PMS are also a myth but happen from time to time. Mama threw a shoe at us one of those times. White laces propelled up and out, spiraling like knotted antennae from the sneaker, whizzing out of the hall in an arc, a teeny-tiny helicopter hunting over a city, a warning shot. She had the latent power of a full-grown woman, which we figured made no difference because she was just old and out of shape. It made all the difference.
I used to get away with the big maxi pads in softball. The uniforms of wrestling were not so forgiv
ing. Even with undershorts the outline of the pad came through like a surfboard. T gave me a tampon and assured me it had nothing to do with virginity and all those other girls were dumbasses. She left me alone in the bathroom. I half read the instructions and didn’t understand the difference between applicator and tampon; they were one and the same and I figured everything had to go in and stay there.
The entire tampon and applicator rested in my vagina like a ballpoint pen when the bone assignment was explained. I held still as possible, curious about the pain women had to have. We needed to go to a butcher for this one, Ms. Lancaster explained. Buy a pork or beef bone, a femur, have the butcher saw it in half lengthwise, tip him for the extra effort, boil the halves for x amount of time, then let them dry or wash them off, but that didn’t make sense, and print out pieces of paper, which also didn’t make sense, and color the bone in a code of some kind. I took notes quickly but still too slowly to get all of the details. The assignment seemed illicit and creepy, with the promise of something beautiful at the end, a colored code, a rainbow after such barbarity. I loved it. I loved that an animal would give up its bones for me to play with in my kitchen then prepare a design, cast labels on the parts like Adam.
T half caught the other shoe Mama threw right at her, held back like a grenade; half caught, half absorbed the impact right in the chest and collarbone, her reflexes whip quick. The third rolled sideways at T, a boot. I deflected it with a smack, didn’t bother to catch it, a mistake really, the ammunition returned. This went on for three more rounds in silence, no screaming, no arguing, just the swing of footwear colliding against palms, meaty sounds from the rubber, nylon, and skin as it all tumbled through the air.
Science kept me alert, the smells of formaldehyde-laden desks half cleaned for decades, enormous black desks with a special chemical coating, dinged and chipped and scratched. They let me do the dirty work, trusted me to peel the gladius from the baby squid, extract the pigeon brain (difficult; one girl slit her nail with a scalpel on the skull), and line them up on a tray. Now I had a bone to work with all to myself.
Mama ran out of breath and gave up the exercise or punishment and retreated to a pot of coffee. No one died. I hated her. I appreciated her. In the abrupt end to the weird conversation between T and Mama and me, one thing rose from the breath of it, a shapeless feeling that scratched and whistled too loud to let anybody take a nap.
When I told T the plastic made the tampon more than uncomfortable, her eyes jostled in her head like gelatin, the white tissue layered around the deep red rippled. Glee took over her whole body, and I realized I’d been making a painful, messy error. I knew not to tell her about the bone because I wanted that for me and no one else. Her laughter struck me as unbelievable, like raising a body from the dead, the kind of miracle better left in our past because to perform it now only raises questions we can’t be bothered to ask.
Ambien and Brown Liquor
Me and T went to the Denny’s across from the hospital at three in the morning the night Mama tried to kill herself. T ordered a BLT sandwich on sourdough with fries. I got the pancake breakfast with eggs sunny-side up, hash browns, and bacon. The waitress was good. Never asked us how we were doing, just punctuated all of her sentences with “sweetie.” What can I get you, sweetie? Anything to drink, sweetie? Coming right up, sweetie.
“Why didn’t you get the chocolate ones like always?” T asked.
“I’m trying out the blueberry.”
She sat back in the booth like it was really something to think about, the blueberry pancakes versus the chocolate pancakes with the whipped-cream smiley face. Certainly, this was not a time for smiles in our food, and she understood that after I did. Maybe figuring that out late was the problem she had to consider so deeply. We should’ve been covered in blood. We hadn’t been taught the proper signs of death, how it doesn’t lurk in dark robes or burst from a warrior’s chest in battle or appear as the slow-motion spray of brain matter and other vital organs scattered in the wind like dandelion fluff. That would’ve made more sense than looking the way we always look except in the face. T looked old as shit. Maybe we both did. Girls our age usually showed up at diners in the middle of the night coming down off pills and wine coolers after being molested for hours on a dance floor.
“You look like Auntie Tammy,” I told her.
“Fuck you,” she said with a laugh.
It was dark outside and quiet, with a thin fog that made the streetlights fuzzy and jittery. Only two other groups were in the entire restaurant, which was large enough to hold fifty or a hundred, I don’t know. A few tables away a family waited, two women, a youngish man, and a girl with a pink balloon tied to her wrist asleep in one of the women’s laps. The balloon hovered above them all, singular and swaying in the air-conditioning. In the other aisle was a couple, two older men, sad like us but a little different. They ate soup and drank ice water with lemon. All of these people should’ve been covered in blood, dried and full of tissue and matted hair. It should be fresh too, running in places from wounds always recently torn open and from the dead that drip onto them. The droopy men and the heavy women and the little girl with her shoe about to fall off her foot as she drooled on the woman’s lap, all of them should’ve been covered in blood. Then the waitress came over and brought our coffee, she too awash in death, smiling behind the steam from the mugs.
“Here you go, sweeties.”
I imagined the coagulated masses of torn flesh dropping into the cups from her chin like red cubes of sugar.
“Thank you,” we said.
I remember going to the emergency room as a kid after an ant crawled into my ear and wouldn’t come out. Mama held my head under the faucet while I cried, but nothing washed out. “It’s in there!” I yelled over and over, hearing it bang and buzz around inside me like a mad tiny chef cooking stir-fry.
T looked up at me, then she looked out at the street. She held her coffee like a woman who had lived a lifetime and earned every sip.
“In the zombie apocalypse, would you kill me if I got bit?” I asked T.
She sweetened her coffee. Tasted it. Then sweetened it some more.
“Or what?” she asked.
“Or just let me turn?”
“Would you try to eat me?”
“Of course.”
I took a bite of bacon and slit the eggs with my fork so the yolk ran into the hash browns.
T leaned forward with her elbows on the table and looked out into the dark empty streets. No cars passed. No people passed. There was nothing out there.
“How would you want me to kill you, then?”
“I don’t care if it hurts some.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, that’s fine.”
“I’d try to not make it hurt, though.”
“So you would kill me?”
I dropped my fork. She squirted ketchup on her fries and began to eat.
“Is that a problem? You seem like you want it, and a lot of times you deserve it. I would just have to remember how annoying you are and then just boom.”
We had very little practice with death before that year, and then the bitch began outperforming itself all around us. First no one was dead, then everyone seemed to be gone or leaving. Life felt like the mystery. All of the people around us acted as if they were alive when really they were closer to the end than they’d like to think. None of the dead and dying we knew looked like they were supposed to.
“So, you’d shoot me? Your favorite sister?”
“My only sister, and maybe. Do we get guns in this movie?”
“It’s not a movie. I just want to know what to expect.”
“Would you kill me, then?”
“No!”
“What? You’d just let me run around all gross and eat people.”
“Yes!”
“That’s crazy.”
She sipped her supersweet coffee and seemed to begin aging backward a little. I was glad for that. I saw T more in that
moment, and maybe I would kill her in the zombie apocalypse if she looked more like T, pretty, her dark eyes cutting deep into whatever she stared at. Maybe I would just let her die like that with that face.
“Right now,” T said. “You have to promise to shoot me in the fucking face if I get bit by a fucking zombie. I do not want to live forever as a rotting chest-bones-out, jaw-swinging corpse.”
I laughed at her imitating a zombie jaw.
“Do that again.”
She did. I laughed harder. The men with the soup got up to pay their bill. The little girl was awake and sipping orange juice from a child’s cup.
“Look,” she said. “Promise. I would kill you, then kill myself, so we wouldn’t have to deal with any of it.”
“But what if there’s a cure? You just popped us both and the next day they announce free cures for everybody recently infected, and we’re all dead and shit.”
T smiled.
“Well, that would be a problem.”
“Yes, a problem!”
“But we’re dead, so it wouldn’t matter. Dead people don’t have problems.”
She reached over with her fork and took a piece of pancake.
“These aren’t as good as the chocolate ones.”
“You just wanted me to get those so you could have some.”
She ate another piece, then another, and quit trying to enjoy her terrible coffee. T liked to eat her sugar rather than drink it. We waited in the car until the sun came up before going back into the hospital. The most frightening things that eat up our lives can’t be seen—simple bacteria, free radicals, cholesterol, time, protein deficiencies, cortisol, vanity, ambition, carcinogens, love, and all the erratic chemicals of grief and abandonment. T had found Mama on the sofa after coming home late. I’d been asleep for a while when I heard T screaming and screaming as if there had been a massacre, blood everywhere and nowhere. Our mother rested the whole day after having a tube inserted into her stomach to siphon the contents. Because she arrived unconscious they gave her a tracheal intubation to make sure she didn’t inhale the poisons during extraction. When I had the ant removed the doctor smiled in my face, and asked if I wanted to keep it. I thought they might bottle up the juices from Mama’s belly and ask if we wanted to take them home, but that didn’t happen. We left with no proof at all.
How to Wrestle a Girl Page 11